SPLC News

Hillsborough is one of 17 Florida counties that has partnered with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in a new model for enforcing immigration detainers. Under a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA), the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office holds individuals for 48 hours after they have served their time on local charges, when ICE determines that they may be subject to deportation. In return, ICE pays Hillsborough $50 per detainee.

Alabama had at least 152 prisoners with a “serious mental illness” in solitary confinement on two randomly chosen days in December 2017 and January 2018, violating a judge’s directive last summer for the state prison system to move seriously mentally ill people out of segregation “as soon as possible.”

The SPLC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency after the death this week of Yulio Castro-Garrido, a 33-year-old Cuban immigrant who was detained at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga.

Schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and – as a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America, according to a study released today by the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project.

The state has not yet come up with an acceptable remedy to address the “horrendously inadequate” and unconstitutional mental health care and staffing needs of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), the SPLC will argue today in closing arguments at a federal trial to correct the problems.